Showing results by author "David Boles" in All Categories

In the British Museum's Mesopotamian galleries, behind glass, sits a clay mask approximately three thousand eight hundred years old. The face was made to terrify. Hooded sockets sink the eyes into darkness, intestinal coils wrap the brow, and a chipped tooth grins from the left side of the mouth. The mask was paid for. Somebody walked silver from a temple administrator's hand to a workshop, where an artisan converted clay and several days of labor into a working monster, and the figure left the workshop on a delivery cart for a fee. The specific contract has not survived.

Ischia is Burning is a novel I excavated from a steel filing cabinet in a Manhattan apartment, where it had been sitting for more than three decades inside a folder marked Ischia, in the form of a screenplay I wrote at twenty-five years old in the second year of an MFA program at Columbia. The novel that has just been published is what happened when I sat down with that folder in May, found the staples rusted and half the dialogue wincing, and wrote what the twenty-five-year-old version could not yet write.

In 1862, President Lincoln signed the Homestead Act. The Act said that any American willing to settle on 160 acres of public land, live there for five years, and improve the parcel, could file a claim and receive title. Between 1862 and 1976, when the Federal Land Policy and Management Act repealed the homesteading provisions in the contiguous states, the United States distributed approximately 270 million acres of continental North America through this mechanism of the registered claim.

Four disembodied cat heads drift through deep space in Life Helmets, searching for their missing bodies. A puppy head who has never had a body searches with them. The soup is stirring in the wrong direction. The quest continues. Whiskerfluff is the captain because someone has to be. Mittens is the navigator who feels phantom paws he cannot explain. Cookie Kitty is the engineer whose soup has become an eighteen-chapter emergency. Skeedootle is a puppy head sealed in a Life Helmet calibrated for a species she does not belong to, and she is the bravest creature on the ship.

Paris, August 19, 1839. François Arago reads the technical details of Louis Daguerre's photographic process into the joint session of the Académie des Sciences and the Académie des Beaux-Arts. Within weeks the satirical press is mocking photographers as mechanics and copyists. Twenty years later, Charles Baudelaire writes the canonical hostile statement: photography belongs in the museum of records, not the gallery of art. The painters of 1839 were wrong. They were also partly right. The Scientific Aesthetic begins with that double judgment and works through its consequences.

In October 1972, a seven-year-old boy in Nebraska sat on red shag carpeting in front of a wood-grain television console and absorbed the full commercial curriculum of Saturday morning. He did not know he was being trained. That is the central finding of this book. Selling Saturday Morning reconstructs the twelve-year period between 1968 and 1980 in which American broadcast television built, contested, and politically ratified a commercial pedagogy of childhood.

In the Republic of Buryatia, in southern Siberia, the funerals come in a steady cadence. Since February 2022, Buryatia has supplied combat soldiers to the war in Ukraine at a per-capita rate among the highest of any region in the Russian Federation. Buryatia is also among the poorest regions of the federation. The young men who die in this war come from the internal periphery, far from Moscow and St. Petersburg. The Russian state has chosen to spend them rather than invest in them. That is the politics of tribute.

Bologna, the 1920s. Giorgio Morandi spends his working life in a small room at 36 Via Fondazza, painting the same bottles and boxes from a low shelf. The objects barely change. The arrangements barely change. What changes across forty years is what Morandi sees in the space between the bottles. London, the 1830s. Michael Faraday spends his working life arranging iron filings on paper around magnets, watching how the patterns shift when the magnets shift. The filings are mundane. The magnets are common.

A pharmacist's grandson discovers that art is the oldest prescription in Western civilization. For twenty-five centuries, from the Theatre of Dionysus to the infinite scroll on your phone, institutional art has functioned not as a liberating force but as a sedative: an analgesic for the pain of consciousness that keeps the patient still while the conditions producing the pain remain untouched. The beauty is real. The emotions are real. The catharsis is real. And the function of all of it is pharmacy. They can't help but stand. You are standing now. You just don't know it yet.

In March 1867, Ezekiel Washington, a Black veteran of the 5th U.S. Colored Troops, files a homestead claim on 160 acres of Nebraska prairie. He builds a soddie with his own hands, breaks the sod, plants corn, and waits for the land to become his. Five years later, a rigged hearing strips him of everything. In 1885, a Bohemian immigrant family purchases the land, never knowing who built the house they now call home. In 1993, Marcus Cole arrives at the prison built on that same ground. Over fifteen years, he learns the story of the man who first claimed it.

Walk south on Peachtree Street in downtown Atlanta on any Tuesday morning in 2026, and you will pass through more layers of surveillance than a federal inmate encountered in a maximum-security facility in 1975. You will not feel them. That is the point. Carceral Nation traces three centuries of surveillance, discipline, and control as they migrated from the prison yard to the schoolroom, the workplace, the digital platform, and the public square.

Nobody teaches you how to grieve. This is the strange truth at the center of an experience so common it touches every person who has ever lived long enough to lose someone. A hybrid cultural investigation and memoir that asks what grief is, where it comes from, who controls it, and what happens when the structures designed to support it are broken. From the neuroscience of loss to the mourning rituals of the Torajan highlands, the burning ghats of Varanasi, and the jazz funerals of New Orleans, this book traces grief across biology, history, culture, economics, and the deeply personal.

At the Emain Institute, a private psychiatric facility on the Hudson River, Dr. Francis Morrow documents patients whose visions defy clinical explanation. Cesare speaks prophecies in his sleep. Deirdre sees her own death in multiple versions, each ending different, none of them false.

A boy stands in a bathroom and discovers his face can change. Asa Greer is five years old when the mirror shows him something that should be impossible: the features of the boy next door, worn on his own skull. The borrowed face lasts three seconds. The cost is permanent. He will never smell his own skin again. Over the next fifty years, Asa consumes more than a hundred faces. Each acquisition deposits a blueprint into his nervous system and extracts an irreversible sensory payment.

There is a sign on a wall at LaGuardia Community College in Queens, mounted above a narrow shelf. The sign bears the universal symbol for Deaf access. The shelf once held a TTY, a text telephone that gave Deaf people their first access to instantaneous distance communication. The TTY is gone. The smartphone replaced it. The sign is still there, pointing to something that no longer exists. That empty shelf is the governing image of this book, because the pattern it represents is the story of every technology Western civilization has worshipped for the past century. Something arrives.

One year after going public, Elle, Meen, Teena, and Tal have become symbols in a national debate about powered individuals. Living in hiding on a Kansas farm, the four girls are summoned to Washington to testify before a Senate committee as Congress prepares to vote on the Protection and Integration Act—a bill that would require registration and monitoring of all people with abilities. Elle is Deaf and commands the wind. Meen is blind and controls fire. Teena has cerebral palsy and moves the earth. Tal is autistic and shapes water. Together, they are the EleMenTs.

An Autopsy of Urban Collapse. In late September 2013, a road crew buried 150-year-old cobblestones under fresh asphalt on Baldwin Avenue in the Jersey City Heights. Something durable was concealed beneath something disposable, for the convenience of the least permanent users of the road. That institutional habit, the preference for covering failure rather than studying it, is the subject of this audiobook.

Who decides what a character is on the American stage? The playwright who created the character, or the institution that controls the production?

Three months after escaping the tunnels beneath New York City, Elle, Meen, and Teena find themselves under constant surveillance. Prometheus Applied Sciences hasn't forgotten them, and a new operative named Sarah Miller has infiltrated their lives as a volunteer at the group home. Elle is Deaf and commands the wind. Meen is blind and controls fire. Teena has cerebral palsy and moves the earth itself. Together, they are the EleMenTs—three teenage girls whose names encode their identity and whose powers defy explanation.

Dr. Lena Vasquez sees something in the data that the statistics do not measure. A gravitational lensing researcher at the University of Chicago, Lena finds a periodic oscillation in the dark matter density profile of a candidate dark galaxy. The signal is faint but structured, repeating with a regularity that cold, collisionless dark matter should not produce.